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Like virtually every Negro woman she knew, she struggled to find the balance between spending time with her children at home and spending time for them, for her family, at a job.
Negro resistance to this injustice had been a constant ever since the first ship carried enslaved Africans to Old Point Comfort on Hampton’s shores in 1609. The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. “Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world” were entitled to “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address.
“Help us to get some of the blessings of democracy here at home first before you jump on the ‘free other peoples’ bandwagon and tell us to go forth and die in a foreign land,”
having internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far.
“You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you,”
Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America’s model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them?
She and her generation were the first in the history of the world to come of age with the possibility of human extinction as a by-product of human ingenuity.
It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance.
